Archives for April 2012

Commentators are competing like never before to share their views on the importance of being co-operative. There is, after all, a revival of the cooperative and the mutual, of co-production, timebanking and social enterprise. While I’ve been far from uncritical of the big society, and official volunteering and ‘participation’ campaigns, I have also been an enthusiastic participant in my own right. I coordinate Neighbourhoods Connect, a volunteer-led social media project in North London, and I’m also a member of the proposal team for a new free school, East London Science School. (We’re still looking for prospective parents and sixth formers to sign up!)

So, allowing for a little bias, I am the first to argue that at first sight there is much to recommend this vogue for all things cooperative. A recently published IPPR report, It’s cooperation, stupid, declares:

… we should jettison the assumption that humans are selfish, first and foremost. Instead, we should start from the assumption that most of the time, most people want to be cooperative.

Which is hard to argue with, you have to admit? Likewise, David Sloan Wilson thinks that being cooperative and ‘society-oriented’ rather than competitive or selfish is the norm not the exception. But here is where the trouble begins. Wilson is an evolutionary biologist who thinks that studying the ‘behaviours’ of people in neighbourhoods is much like Jane Goodall studying chimpanzees. Despite, or perhaps because of, his rather demeaning assumption Wilson and his ‘evolutionary toolkit’ are very much in demand. He was in the UK recently at the invitation of the Co-operative Group. According to Bibi van der Zee at The Guardian:

… his theories are now finding favour with politicians and policy thinktanks on both sides of the Atlantic who are desperate to engage communities in their own neighbourhoods to work together at solving intractable social ills more effectively and cheaply than the state.

Which in itself – for all the short-sightedness of austerity politics, and the bleating on about cuts – is not a bad sentiment. Deborah Orr, also at The Guardian, thinks we need to ‘focus on the things that we all have in common, that bind us and make us human; the things that make co-operation both crucial and sensible, beneficial to all involved’. Can’t grumble with that. Or can I? Orr recalls her own experience of working at the now defunct City Limits magazine, a self-styled workers’ cooperative that was, she says, most uncooperative. But it is the model she professes to prefer – Alcoholics Anonymous – that concerns me. She is apparently oblivious to the therapeutic authoritarianism of the 12-step programme, concluding that it is ‘good to stop listening out for, and holding fast to, the things that make us individual and different’. I am no fan of identity politics and the divisiveness it fosters – no more, indeed, than I am of Wilson’s genetic determinism – and I subscribe rather more than she to old-fashioned collective ideas like socialism. But Orr’s enthusiasm for cooperation seems to amount to a desire to submerge the robust individual – who would surely shun the dictates of AA in favour of a little genuine ‘self-help’ – in a ‘soothing’ sea of collective therapy.

Her commentary is inspired by a new book, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation, by sociologist Richard Sennett. I will be introducing a discussion about it at the Future Cities Readers’ Group next month. I confess I haven’t started reading it yet – or that IPPR report come to think of it – but the omens aren’t good.

Earlier this year, Gavin Poole, Executive Director at the Centre for Social Justice – a think tank founded by Iain Duncan Smith in his backbench wilderness years between standing down as Tory Leader and becoming Work and Pensions Secretary – put the case for the new therapeutic authoritarianism at the heart of the welfare reforms. Its not just about getting the lazy so-an-so’s off their backsides and into a job any more, he said. Its about ‘[h]elping parents become an example to their children, to become role models; raising self-esteem; lowering the staggering rates of depression that are found in workless homes’ etc.

Which only goes to show that the welfare reforms were not built on a hostility to welfarism as such. Instead of seeking to remove the state from people’s lives – which would have been welcome – they simply reworked this relationship of dependency. The capping of benefits at £500 a week or £26,000 a year (the national household average after tax), said Poole, is not about the money but about ‘reframing the work choice’. But the problem lies elsewhere, with his enthusiasm for the government’s Work Programme and top-down interventions in the so-called 120,000 ‘problem families’ identified in the wake of the riots. The truth is that the therapeutic assumptions that underlie each – involving much hand-holding and mandatory nannying, respectively – mean that a continued relationship of dependency is not only ensured, but further entrenched.

Remarkable as it seems when you look back at the apparently furious reaction to the reforms; all parties are signed up to this new, even more damaging, model of welfare. Neither the Labour Party, the Bishops in the House of Lords or former Bosnian Overlord, Paddy Ashdown were fundamentally opposed – however much they feigned to be. They only called, respectively, for a local cap to avoid the burden on some Council Tax payers of increased homelessness, or sought ‘transitional arrangements’ to protect the mental health of families who could no longer afford to live off the state. The government even conceded on these points, introducing a discretionary fund for Councils to draw on and allowing claimants 9-months to find work or somewhere else to live before the cap takes effect. You might say that the therapeutic politics of the new welfare state were apparent on all sides of the ‘debate’ that preceded the passing of the reforms. Only ex-Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey dared to trouble the consensus. Far from defeating want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness, the welfare state has become an ‘industry of gargantuan proportions which is fuelling those very vices and impoverishing us all’, he said. Quite. I’m not a CofE man, but given all the prevaricating of the last incumbent, if Carey is thinking of standing again he gets my vote.

I attended Autism, Ethics and the Good Lifeon World Autism Day. It was the day after April Fools Day. On hearing some of the stranger arguments put forward by speakers I was tempted to check my diary.

Dr Tim Cadman, at Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, explained to the uninitiated that while some understand autism as a disorder, others – particularly proponents of the social model and members of the ‘autistic community’ – understand it less as a condition to be treated than as a ‘distinct cognitive style’. One rather articulate speaker, K Leneh Buckle, who was severely disabled, mute and incommunicative as a child, thought she had since ‘lost something very special’. Professor Stuart Murray at the Centre for Medical Humanities at University of Leeds spoke disparagingly of the ‘narrative of diagnosis’ around autism.

This peculiar lauding of autism as a good thing, and the concomitant problematising of those who see it as a condition to be treated, was a recurrent theme. This is foolish. Not least because a diagnosis in any meaningful sense is a long way off. We heard how people are ‘diagnosed’ as a means to an end, as a way of accessing the support they need. Professor Francesca Happe, a colleague of Cadman’s, explained that it is only when a person’s ‘autistic-like traits are causing them significant difficulties’ that a diagnosis results. But this imprecision (autistic-like?) – not to mention the understandable opportunism of desperate parents – far from being worried over was instead celebrated by speakers and delegates alike.

Happe was surely right to note that the various behaviours ‘on the spectrum’ are as alike as apples and oranges. It might be better to talk of autisms rather than autism, she said. But I don’t see how this would get us any further if we don’t have a singularly reliable definition to begin with. From the severely autistic child, unable to speak or make eye contact, prone to hand-flapping and unable to make themselves understood; to the highly gifted if ‘odd’ and socially awkward individual with a neglected talent – there is much to differentiate those declared autistic, but little it seems to justify their belonging to a spectrum.

What was remarkable, though, was that despite an apparent consensus that talk of a spectrum is wrong-headed, this was not on account of it being too broad. Apparently it isn’t broad enough. Rather than arguing that there needs to be greater clarity about the condition, the better to ground medical interventions and treat it, there was if anything a desire for a further blurring of what autism is. We are all autistic in one way or another. The logic is perverse but in the absence of a medical explanation of what causes it (whatever ‘it’ is); autism is pretty much whatever you want it to be. For good and for bad.

Happe described a ‘triad of impairments’ typically associated with autism – social impairments, communication impairments and rigid or repetitive behaviour. The last of which seems to cause the most difficulty when it comes to defining autism. In what way are the ‘obsessional’ pursuits of those with a keen interest in maths or astronomy distinguishable from people with a definable condition in need of treatment? People living such intense or rarefied existences can be rather unusual shall we say. Does that make them autistic? I can’t have been the only person in the room self-diagnosing.

I’m bookish, a bit of a loner, have what Happe described as an ‘eye for detail’, and routinely offend against the emotionally correct dictates of our let it all hang out culture. Maybe I too am ‘on the spectrum’?! Or maybe what was once regarded as quite normal is today stigmatised, the sorts of traits once understood as part of the diversity of human flourishing, as characteristics to be admired, are now seen as undesirable, a problem or beyond all but the weirdest of individuals who, for whatever reason, stand apart from the rest of us? While not wanting anything to do with the autism as identity crowd, perhaps we do have a problem when it comes to the narrowing of what it means to be human.

So while Murray’s relentless relativising of autism grated, I was rather taken with his critique of the reductionist and deterministic narratives associated with the condition. Not least the use of brain imaging to suggest autism can be found in particular regions of the cerebral cortex; or bad reportage describing ‘lone wolves’ bent on terrorist acts as autistic. He could have gone further though. While Murray was right to make the comparison with long-since discredited 19th Century phrenology, ‘brain science’ – it’s 21st Century and no less spurious equivalent – is all the rage right now. Just read the ‘research’ conducted by the Iain Duncan Smith-founded Centre for Social Justice or Matthew Taylor’s Royal Society of Arts.

The truth is that both the discrediting of pseudoscience and the humanising of autism, require a hard-headed approach to what we objectively know and a fuller account of what human beings are made of. In this regard, Sandy Starr of the Progress Educational Trust was surely right. He told us that having something wrong with your health isn’t the same as having something wrong with you as a person.

The difficulty with autism, he said, is its ‘profound effect on people’s sociality’. It impinges on one’s sense of self so fundamentally that it is inseparable from it. That doesn’t make it desirable or in any way constitutive of a person’s identity as the likes of Buckle claim. An autistic man in the audience declared himself pleased to be free of the everyday anxieties most people experience. ‘I hardly feel anything’ he said. Rather sadly, I thought. Even if he didn’t know it himself he is missing out on something that his condition denies him. I for one would rather be anxious.

Dave Clements Limited

I am a writer and consultant with over fifteen years experience working in senior strategic, management, project and engagement roles, and advising local government, the NHS and other public sector and VCS organisations. I am available for commissions.